


Under the Shadow

by duckbunny, Istezada



Series: The Celestial (Trade) Union [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A conversation about a conversation, Aziraphale has too many feels, Crowley has more feels than he expected, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Not that Crowley doesn't have feels but he wasn't expecting to feel them about this, a conversation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 18:12:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19323433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Istezada/pseuds/Istezada
Summary: Involving a flabbergasted demon, a worried angel, two unexpected conversations, an equally unexpected apple, more wings than usual, and the precise and deliberate use of a name.





	Under the Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Here, we must pause and thank Duckbunny for graciously allowing me to borrow his version of the post-apocalyptic universe and muddle about (also for courteously pointing out mistakes with the canon thereof). Most of this universe hasn't been written down yet, so allow me to introduce a few pertinent facts.
> 
> 1: The Celestial (Trade) Union is a renewal of faith and stuff by angels and demons both, focused on Peace and Love of Creation, and the belief that People are Good, Actually.
> 
> 2: There are at least two sacraments of the Union. The disavowal of the previous paradigm and the confirmation of the above sentiments, and the communal eating of apples (I keep telling Duck that apple pie counts. I'm not sure he believes me.) in memory of Adam the First and Adam the Second.
> 
> 3: The idea of Sacramental Apples was introduced by Herself on the anniversary of Armagedidn't.

“Hello?”

“...Angel?”

Aziraphale blinked with consternation at the copy of _Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads_ he was reading. It was only a third edition, published 1899, and made without significant alterations (unlike the previous edition). That being the case, Aziraphale was reluctantly considering the possibility of selling it to a young lady who had expressed interest for some weeks now.

That dilemma was brushed aside by Crowley’s voice on the phone. He sounded… wrong. Uncertain. Broken. No, not broken. _Shattered_.

“What is it?” he asked, gently closing the volume of poetry and setting it down.

“I… St. James?” The fragments of Crowley’s composure tumbled into laughter.

Crowley liked to laugh. Crowley had done a lot of laughing, over the millennia. Never, in more than six thousand years, had Aziraphale heard a laugh like this come out of Crowley’s corporeal form. 

“Crowley, what...?”

Crowley hung up.

Well.

He was a demon, after all.

Aziraphale sighed.

He put Kipling back in its spot.

He closed his shop. (At least he wouldn’t have to make a decision about the book just yet.)

Aziraphale went to St. James’ Park.

***

Crowley stood with uncharacteristic rigidity at the lake’s edge. That was unsettling, but not what made Aziraphale’s next completely unnecessary breath catch in his throat.

Just beyond the vision of the humans passing only meters away, Crowley’s wings—giant, black and shimmering as the crows whose name he’d taken—Crowley’s wings were swept into existence and wrapped tightly around himself. Despite the obscuring feathers, there was no hiding the tension in every lean muscle and braced and locked joint.

“Crowley?”

The demon actually startled. As if he hadn’t expected to be addressed. As if he hadn’t asked for this meeting. As if he hadn’t expected Aziraphale to come. He startled. 

And then, with a visible effort, his shoulders relaxed and his elbows bent, thereby ensuring the continued structural integrity of his trouser pockets (short of a miracle). “Angel.”

Almost, his voice was back to normal.

Almost.

If it weren’t for the fact that there were dried tear tracks slipping beneath his glasses. If it weren’t for the fact that another tear meandered down his cheek while Aziraphale watched.

“My dear, what has happened?”

Aziraphale’s shoulders wriggled helplessly under his coat. While Crowley might allow himself the indulgence of shelter during rain, for old times’ sake, he’d never been the… huggy sort. Neither of them were, to be fair. Beings of divine, supernatural power do not, as a general rule, hug. There is something about them that puts people off the notion, oddly enough. But…

And it was an absurdly beautiful day, really.

Crowley, for his part, opened his mouth and produced a noise somewhere between a huff and a whimper (mostly a huff, surely) before snapping his teeth sharply together again. Aziraphale was perfectly familiar with the set of Crowley's eyebrows over his sunglasses when he indulged in a terrific glare. He was looking at it right now. The look of sickened horror that rippled across the demon's face, interrupting the glare, was... less familiar. (Not that the demon was never horrified, but not like _that_.) Also unfamiliar was the...

"Sorry," Crowley hissed, very quietly and very definitely not aimed at Aziraphale at all.

Aziraphale was certain he'd misheard that. He was similarly sure that whatever had happened was far more serious than he'd previously thought. Under normal circumstances, he would have said that Crowley had been on the verge of performing a petty miracle, venting his tension by making a tourist trip into a bench or having a duck catch a fit of sneezes (don't ask). But that didn't explain the apparent nausea or the apology that he absolutely hadn't heard.

“Really, Crowley.”

 _That_ was definitely more of a huff and now, apparently, his spine was loosened enough for him to look at Aziraphale.

“Did something happen at Tree?” This was ridiculous. He was an angel. There were books he could be reading right now. But something had happened, somewhere, bad enough to have sent Crowley—Crowley!—straight past babbling panic into whatever this was.

And that laugh…

If Crowley needed him to play Twenty Questions, Aziraphale could indulge him.

“N… well… after. Sort of. It…”

Five words was an improvement, Aziraphale supposed.

“After?”

Crowley stared at him for several seconds before nodding and looking away again. “I'd... I'd just got home,” he said slowly, "and was... just puttering, really. Putting the extra apples in the fridge, checking m'plants. You know.”

Aziraphale nodded encouragement of full sentences and coherent thought.

“I’d just flipped off the garbage disposal and She...”

Aziraphale flinched and this time his instinctive shoulder twitch had nothing at all to do with the desire to comfort his demon.

There were angels and demons whose corporeal forms took female shapes. Some of them attended Tree. None of them had a proper personal pronoun that—even in mortal, human English, even when spoken by a demon—rang with the ancient harmonies of Home. He hadn’t been Home since the assignment to Earth, since the establishment of the Head Office to make everyone’s reporting more efficient. He missed it, if less so now that the Metatron was (still, by all accounts) obsessed with musical theatre.

“ _She_ …?” he repeated carefully, and couldn’t quite help glancing around as if he might catch Her watching them.

Crowley’s tight lips curled in an equally tight smile, even while his nostrils flared around an unsteady breath and his wings shifted. Relaxed. Re-wrapped themselves around his body.

“ _She_ popped in for a visit,” he said.

Aziraphale blinked. Crowley’s apology to… the lake?… was firmly set aside for later and he stared up at his friend.

He’d seen what holy water did to demons. What Her actual metaphysical (or physical, if She so chose) Presence would do to a demon… to Crowley.

Angels didn’t need to breathe. Neither did they need to swallow. Usually, Aziraphale didn’t notice the lack. Right at that moment, he couldn’t breathe and his mouth was as dry as that new desert stretched across north-western Africa and every fiber of his being screamed for relief.

“She… wh...” he took a turn stammering at Crowley

“She…” Crowley licked his lips. One hand shifted from his trouser pocket to his jacket pocket and emerged again. In it, dotted with lint and just beginning to brown, was the core of an apple.

“No.”

“Oh yes.”

“My dear Crowley...”

The demon’s head bent to study the remains of the fruit, a Cox from the smell and remnants of the skin. “She made me say it,” he muttered.

“To _Her_? Good lord.”

“I renounce Satan and all his works and all that… that rot that your bunch cobbled together. Not _that_. Or not like that. But you know, th… What he _did_ , with the Them, in Tadfield. The words.”

Aziraphale nodded, wide-eyed.

“It wasn’t… I mean, it wasn’t _hard_. I meant it, just… Fucking heaven, angel, I haven’t been that terrified since the whole… since before the bloody garden. Couldn’t bear to look at Her, y’know? Couldn’t... couldn't look anywhere else. Didn’t dare breathe. And She just…”

Behind the glasses, sunlight caught and glinted off golden eyes as Crowley glanced briefly up at Aziraphale. Before he had a hope of interpreting the expression on the demon’s face, he’d looked away again, back out over the lake and the ducks squabbling nearby.

“She called me Anthony,” he said very, very softly.

Anthony. Antonius. Derived from some Etruscan word that neither of them remembered anymore, but popularly believed to mean “priceless”.

Aziraphale’s lungs, finally, relaxed and he exhaled and took another breath. “And She...”

Crowley’s entire face rippled, from his hairline to his jaw and out to both ears. The fingers cupped around a perfectly normal apple core twitched. “She grabbed an apple from the fridge and we... ate it.”

The angel swallowed.

For several long moments, neither of them spoke. Aziraphale’s gaze flicked between the apple core and his friend’s form as the latter, slowly, began to shiver within his enveloping wings. A tremor ran from his coiffed and gelled hair, down through his wings to their tips, and out into the grass through the soles of his feet. And then another. And another.

“Do you…” Crowley whispered, still staring at the lake, “Has She…”

He seemed at a loss for words, again, and fresh tears were finding their silent ways down his cheeks while he trembled, so Aziraphale took a guess. “Spoken to me? Not since the anniversary. If you count that as ‘speaking’. Which I do. But, no, not like this.”

Crowley laughed. Shorter than the stumbling eruption over the phone lines, but just as alien. Just as brimming, overflowing with…

Wonder?

Joy?

“No. Angel.” He glanced down at the apple again and returned it to his pocket before gesturing in the general vicinity of Aziraphale’s own invisible wings. “Your… do you… Have you felt Hers?”

Aziraphale’s mouth dropped open like something from a human cartoon. “Her…” He swallowed again. Of course, Crowley hadn’t felt the Shadow for millennia. He’d existed in that… that _place_ … and without Her Wings. “Crowley, She let you...”

“Wasn’t a lot of letting involved,” Crowley muttered (almost, but wholly unrelated to, a complaint). “She just up and Boom! Everywhere. All around me and the table and the flat… I’m never going to get my plants to listen to me again… and just…”

That explained his posture, at least. In a way. It was a reasonable enough response.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. She will cover thee with Her feathers, and under Her wings shalt thou trust,” Aziraphale quoted, remembering Moshe composing the song after the completion of the Tabernacle in the desert.

Crowley grimaced. “Poncy gits, the Hampton Court Conference.”

Aziraphale did not roll his eyes. “And you had your fun with them, as I recall.”

The demon snorted. “Too right.”

Silence fell again.

“Forgotten what it felt like,” Crowley said at last. “Forgotten the… everything.”

He just nodded. It would be easier to forget, when you’d spent the last six millennia knowing that you’d never feel it again.

And then it started to rain.

Aziraphale was _quite_ certain that he’d had nothing to do with it. If he had, he would have brought an umbrella. He could not, of course, be certain that Crowley hadn’t miracled up some weather. He was also not certain that Crowley would have had the forethought, in his current state of mind, to bring an umbrella along, either way.

Regardless, in the last several seconds, from somewhere unknown to modern forecasters, a steady rain had arrived and settled, without introduction or prior announcement, over St. James’ Park. The ducks scattered and Aziraphale felt a relieved, awed, and (quite frankly) giddy smile tug at the corners of his mouth. Crowley was alright. Or he would be. And whatever other fallout might still occur over the world not ending, he didn’t have to worry about Her response to Crowley’s part in it.

“Allow me,” he said and extended one wing, just beyond the vision of mortal London, over Crowley's head.

Crowley snorted softly, but ducked closer. “’Ppreciate it, angel. Y’do realize that we’re still getting wet, right?”

Metaphysical wings do not stop physical rain—a fact known to only a few.

“Oh, shut up.” Aziraphale pulled in a long breath, smelling the sudden damp in the air and the grass and their wings. He’d been on this planet, more or less, for six thousand years. An unscheduled rain was a cue, if ever he’d seen one. A distraction was needed. A change of scene and subject. “It’s my turn, I think. Might I… ahem… tempt you to some curry soba from Tokyo Diner?”

Crowley, who was at least as good at recognizing his cues as Aziraphale, made an insultingly dubious noise. “Dunno. Don’t think angels tempt, really. Not their thing.”

“What a pity.”

Crowley smirked.

Aziraphale sniffed primly.

Under the engulfing Shadow of Her Wings, they went to Leicester Square for lunch. After lunch, he decided, as he shielded them both from the rain (minor miracles are much more effective than incorporeal wings, for the record), he’d ask about that apology. Well. Maybe. After lunch and some drinks back at the shop. Probably. (He wasn’t sure if this called for wine or something stronger—he’d figure that out later.) He might wait a week or two and give Crowley a chance to calm down.

First, lunch.

**Author's Note:**

> So... that happened. Do you have thoughts about what drink should be paired with the... trauma?... experienced during an encounter with Herself? Let me know over [here](https://istezada.tumblr.com/).


End file.
